ACRL Insider reports that “The ACRL Board of Directors, at its June 23, 2018, meeting, in New Orleans at the ALA Annual Conference, approved the establishment of the ACRL Academic Librarians Standards and Guidelines Review Task Force to review the proposed Guidelines for Academic Librarian Employment and Governance Systems, to consider therecommendations of a previous task force, to solicit input from a broad group of stakeholders, and to ensure that revisions include readily identifiable procedures for both librarians without faculty status and those with faculty tenure-track appointments. ACRL President Lauren Pressley invites you to volunteer to serve on this newly created task force. If you wish to be considered for an appointment, please review the information below and complete the web formby 5:00 p.m. Central on July 31, 2018…”

According to ARL News “the International Alliance of Research Library Associations (IARLA)—a global coalition of several major research and academic library associations in Australia, Canada, Europe, and the United States, including the Association of Research Libraries—commits to the principles of net neutrality.

ARL News also notes that “the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has released Library Development, SPEC Kit 359, which gathers information to better understand the supporting structures and resources (personnel, financial, and material) and the activities and expectations associated with library development efforts at ARL member libraries…”

District Dispatch reports that “Federal funding for library priorities in fiscal year (FY) 2019 took another step in the right direction with Wednesday evening’s House Appropriations Committee approval of level funding for critical library programs Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) and the Innovative Approaches to Literacy (IAL). Under the bill, which originated from the Labor-HHS-Education Appropriations Subcommittee, LSTA would receive $186.3 million for FY 2019 while IAL would receive $27 million…”

Citing the OpenCitations Blog, infoDOCKET notes the introduction of “the Crossref Open Citation Index (COCI) [“300 million open citations created from the ‘Open’ references included in Crossref”], our first open citation index, in which we have applied the concept of citations as first-class data entities to index the contents of one of the major open databases of scholarly citation information, namelyCrossref, and to render and make available this information in machine-readable RDF…”

Library Journal reports that “Northeastern University (NEU) has launched the Boston Research Center, an addition to its library that will focus on interdisciplinary studies of Boston’s history. Dan Cohen, vice provost for information collaboration and Dean of the Libraries at Northeastern, notes that the Center is a natural outgrowth of Northeastern’s already-extensive collection of Boston-related materials…”

According to KnowledgeSpeak “SPARC Europe has announced that it is undertaking a new research initiative that will shed light on the various patterns of rewards and incentives being employed by funding organisations as well as those that address openness of the research they fund. Funders are crucial players in the advancement of Open Access and Open Science. Their use of rewards and incentives have a huge impact on whether or not research they support is ultimately published via Open journals and other channels – freely available to all…”

Knowledgespeak also reports that “open-access scholarly publisherFrontiers is the 4th most cited publisher amongst the 20 largest publishers, ranked by average citations over a three-year period (2015-2017). The same analysis also reveals a citation advantage of Open Access journals over subscription journals in the last three years…“